SHAKESPEARE THE CONTRADICTIONS OF HONOUR ANITA PACHECO D. PHIL. THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE AUGUST,1990 This thesis is dedicated to Prof. J.A. Berthoud ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract v Abbreviations vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 The Concept of Honour from Antiquity to the Renaissance 25 CHAPTER 2 Through History Towards Tragedy: Chivalric Honour in Henry V and Troilus and Cressida 95 CHAPTER 3 The Tragedy of the Individual: Revenge Honour in Hamlet 194 CHAPTER 4 ,Julius Caesar and CQriolanus: The Social Tragedy of Public Service 279 iii CONCLUSION 353 BIBLIOGRAPHY 360 iv ABSTRACT This study explores the concept of honour as it enters into several Shakespearean plays. It presents an historical definition of honour in the light of which Shakespeare's treatment of the concept can be seen as a response to the complex ethical inheritance of the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 studies the main classical and medieval traditions of honour and the reception by the Renaissance of this plurality of ideas. The first section explores honour in the context of the pagan concept of social virtue and identifies it as an unstable secular formulation of virtue which defines the aristocratic public function. The second section examines the two principal medieval responses to this secular ethic: the Augustinian denial of the human capacity for virtue and the scholastic compromise tradition. which grants man a limited power for well-doing and. in integrating secular virtue into the structure of creation. provides the framework for chivalric honour. The third section presents honour in the Renaissance as an expression of this diverse classical and Christian heritage. It identifies three traditions - the chivalric. the humanist and the Calvinist - that reflect an age of divided ethical allegiances in which Shakespeare was led to explore honour as a problematic and ultimately tragic concept. v Chapter 4 discusses Shakespeare's treatment of the chivalric tradition in Henry Y and Troilus and Cressida. It argues that both plays. though in very different ways. interrogate that tradition and its claim to incorporate honour within the system of natural law - Henry Y by exposing its weakness as an historical model. Trojlus and Cressjda by showing its connection to an individualistic honour. Chapter 5 examines honour in Hamlet in the context of the revenge ethic. It suggests that the protagonist's contradictory task - the virtuous cause that is a mandate to exact private vengeance - enacts the self-defeating tensions in honour. and that this tragic conflict is played out within a Christian universe which offers the possibility of the transcendence of honour. Chapter 6 explores Shakespeare's treatment of the pagan concept of public service in Juljus Caesar and Corjolanus. It attempts to show that Shakespeare portrays this concept as tragically flawed because reliant for social order on an aristocratic honour which makes individual excellence inseparable from self-assertion. vi ABBREVIATIONS The Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences Essays in Criticjsm A Journal pf Enilish Literary History Renaissance Hudson Review The Journal of the History of Ideas The Journal of Medjeval and Renajssance Studies Journal of the Warburi and Court auld Instjtutes Modern Laniuaie Review vii Modern Philolo~y Publicauon.s of the Modern Lanauaae A_ssociat i0n of America BES.. ns Rev~.ew o_f E_.nolish Studies. new series Studies inniE lish Literature 1500-1900 Shakespeare Survey Stud~.es 1..n PhiloloiY Shakespeare Quarterly UniverSlt.y Review University of Toronto Yale Review viii INTRODUCTION The Oxford English Dictionary offers two main definitions of the word 'honour': 1) High respect, esteem, or reverence, accorded to exalted worth or rank; deferential admiration or approbation; 2) Personal title to high respect or esteem; honourableness; 'nobleness of mind, scorn of meanness, magnanimity' (J); a fine sense of and strict allegiance to what is due or right (also, to what is due according to some conventional or fashionable standard of conduct). Honour, it would seem, has a double sense, one internal and one external to the self. It involves both the way one is seen by others and the way one sees oneself; both the esteem in which one is held and the moral (or conventional) principles on which one bases one's actions. The wording of the two definitions establishes an integral link between them: high respect rewards exalted worth which in turn is the title to high respect. The semantic duality of honour. which one might designate in the simplest terms as 'virtue' and 'reputation'. appears with varying emphases in many critical studies of the concept in the plays of Shakespeare. Alice Shalvi. in her essay '"Honor" in Trojlus and Cressjda'. sets up a distinction between the Renaissance concept of honour as virtuous activity in accordance with the rational principles of moral law and a rival code of honour which was focussed on reputation to the detriment of moral dictates.1 According to Shalvi. it is this 1.Alice Shalvi. '"Honor" in Troilus and Cressida'. S!L. V (1965). 283-302. 2